Indians in Computer Science

[Bippy_the_Beardless]

From my experience and chatting with many Indian colleagues it seems there is a cultural answer to this.

1. Indian culture values sertain trades and skills higher or lower on a sort-of scale not found so much in the west.
2. The scale is effected by cultural changes and relative position of different trades moves over time.
3. About 15 years ago, when I was going to go to University the top of the scale for English Indians was roughly Medicine, Accounting, Pharmacy, Science-Math-Computing,… with the arts perhapse considered worse than shop keeping.
4. This seems to have changed now, with computing being considered different to hard science-Math so now the list may be more like Computing, Medicine, Accounting, Pharmacy, Science-Math_computing, Acting, … where Acting is gaining popularity with the world wide recognition of Indian film making.

The above may well be slanted by the fact that a good Indian friend was studying Accounting and insisted it was second only to Medicine, he may not have been telling the whole truth.
I would be interested to know how Indians perseve the value of Vetinarian study.

[Acsenray]

@Wendell Wagner

I suspect that the “Indians” that the OP describes as being in his university’s computer science department are actually a mixture of Indians, Pakastanis, etc., since he presumably didn’t go around asking people their nationality but just relied on looks. Most Americans make only two distinctions between most of the people of Asia when going strictly by looks. There are “Indians,” who are actually from any of the countries of South Asia.

Such generalizing is not entirely unjustified, from my point of view. As an Indian-American myself, when speaking in general cultural terms, I find it tiresome to have to refer to Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Nepalis, Sri Lankans, etc., when, really, we’re talking about a single culture – a diverse culture, certainly, but nevertheless with more in common than not. As a Bengali, especially, it seems to me supremely redundant to refer to “Indians and Bangladeshis” when speaking about something relevant to the Bengali ethnic group. Somehow I don’t like the term “South Asian” – it seems too imprecise. And the term “Indian” for the whole region was accurate until 1947.

[Wendell_Wagner]

Sometimes I use “the Indian subcontinent” for India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. I thought though that the people from the countries other than India don’t like that term because it makes it sound like everything except India is marginal. Another term I’ve thought of is “the Raj,” for all of those countries plus Burma. Those are the countries that constituted what the British ruled and called “India” from the mid-18th century to the mid-20th century. But I suppose that wouldn’t be too popular either.

[gouda]

@Bippy the Beardless

3. About 15 years ago, when I was going to go to University the top of the scale for English Indians was roughly Medicine, Accounting, Pharmacy, Science-Math-Computing,… with the arts perhapse considered worse than shop keeping.
4. This seems to have changed now, with computing being considered different to hard science-Math so now the list may be more like Computing, Medicine, Accounting, Pharmacy, Science-Math_computing, Acting, … where Acting is gaining popularity with the world wide recognition of Indian film making.

I’d slot in various engineering disciplines (mechanical and electronics, esp.) between medicine and accounting. Accounting works for those who make it as a chartered accountant - those who don’t, well, tend to get stuck in a rut. I haven’t noticed pharmacy to be an especially popular discipline. You’re right about the arts though, even today. Acting is indeed gaining popularity, but it hasn’t yet achieved the kind of social acceptance that have other non-traditional professions have.

Veterinary sciences - gaining in popularity, as more and more people can afford to keep pets. It’s a booming industry.

Wendell Wagner, you’re right. Most citizens of countries other than India don’t particularly appreciate the region being called the Indian sub-continent (this is second-hand information). For that matter, a few states in India don’t paticularly care for being part of the Indian republic!